Reviewed by: The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 by Kristin A. Olbertson Anne Lombard The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776. By Kristin A. Olbertson. Studies in Legal History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 337 pages. Cloth, ebook. Since at least the 1990s, historians have linked the development of gentry class consciousness in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American colonies with a cultural ideal of genteel refinement that had developed earlier in England.1 Most men with property and power in the colonies lacked the genteel or aristocratic birth that had anchored upper-class status in England a century earlier. Instead, elite colonial men based their claims to gentry status on their adoption of upper-class British ideals of behavior, education, and speech. The boundaries between "polite" colonial gentlemen and the "vulgar" (2) lower sorts came to be marked largely by language and culture. In general, historians have treated gentility in eighteenth-century British America as the expression of a particular upper-class culture. Members of the political and social elite acted like gentlemen, presumably impressing one another with their dignity and authority. But what happened when people outside of the elite scoffed or thumbed their noses at the new ideals of politeness? Kristin A. Olbertson, in this deeply researched, provocative, and often brilliant book, The Dreadful Word, argues that in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, genteel codes of behavior were not merely informal norms but were imposed through the law on those who refused to defer to the polite elite. Specifically, politeness was enforced and enacted through the regulation of "impolite" (2) speech and the prosecution of speech crimes such as swearing, cursing, contempt of authority, defamation, and lying. Speech crime prosecutions were not new in the eighteenth-century. The Puritans who first settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 made vigorous efforts to regulate ungodly speech and prosecute behavior that was by then tolerated in the English legal system. Criminal prosecutions for swearing, cursing, railing (insulting or mocking someone), singing, making noise in public, lying, and defaming were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. But scholars have long assumed that after Massachusetts agreed to adhere to the English common law under the Charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691—the Second Charter—its courts became less concerned with victimless morals offenses and more concerned with crimes of property.2 With [End Page 413] this legal change, scholars have assumed that prosecutions for speech crimes grew rare. In fact, Olbertson shows, speech crime prosecutions remained surprisingly common in Massachusetts from 1691 until the beginning of the American Revolution. In a comprehensive analysis of all surviving records from 1690 to 1776 from the county courts of General Sessions—which met quarterly to hear low-level criminal cases—in addition to justice of the peace records, she has found more than 1,600 cases involving criminal prosecutions for speech crimes. Many of these prosecutions were brought under statutes enacted after 1691 that prohibited swearing, cursing, blaspheming, railing, singing in taverns, lying and defamation, perjury, and spreading false news. Others appear to have been prosecuted under the English common law, as it was understood in Massachusetts. In either case, speech crimes continued to be a significant concern for Massachusetts law long after 1691. For Olbertson, these cases provide a window to observe how the law worked to establish genteel codes of politeness and shore up the authority of the colonial gentry. Following Rhys Isaac, Olbertson argues that courts were public, performative spaces that tutored spectators about proper behavior and demonstrated the difference between virtuous authority and uncivil disruption.3 Local law enforcement in early America was highly participatory; low-level criminal prosecutions were often initiated by individual community members and carried out by justices of the peace and judges who had little or no formal legal training. As a result, proceedings in the lower courts provided a public arena for average colonial Americans to observe and participate in debates about what the law should be, who was entitled to its protections, and who deserved its punishment. Olbertson employs the evidence from these court records in intriguing ways. First, she uses language from grand jury...
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Aug 19, 2024
Matthew C O’Neal 
Open Access